


The Glitter Soldier And The Whining Commandoes

by bomberqueen17



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Camping, Gen, survivalism, teenage girls
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-03-17 10:58:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3526721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Former Howling Commando turned elite assassin, James "Bucky" Barnes is one of the world's leading experts on military special forces tactics and survival.<br/>Naturally, he chooses to run an intensive survival course... for Girl Scouts. </p><p>Well, he was sort of mad at the Army. And he's always been a fan of the Girl Scouts of America.<br/>Although the actual organization won't approve it because of insurance purposes, but most of the people are members of a scouting troup for girls. Plus a couple of moms, a teenage brother, Natasha Romanov, and Kate-Hawkeye, because Bucky thinks her training is crap. </p><p>Glitter, mayhem, whining, and hijinks ensue.<br/>This is, naturally, a Tumblr fic, consolidated here for amusement purposes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Elevator Pitch

Natasha’s phone vibrated in her pocket, and she surreptitiously checked it while Dorothea was telling the girls about the security clearances of the elevators.

Bucky: are those girls couts

She blinked at the message, and it was updated with a *scouts after a moment. She started to write back, but just sent the letter y and looked calculatingly at the ceiling vent of the elevator.

Her phone vibrated in her hand.

Bucky: are girlscouts still the same thing

She shook her head. “As what?” she wrote back.

Bucky: my sisters were girl scouts

Bucky: there was knot tying and shit

Natasha wrote back, “I’m not from this heathen nation, I don’t know what all this is, I’m just working security.”

“That’s not a walkie-talkie thing,” one of the girls observed shrewdly. “This lady textin’!”

Several of the other girls reacted, laughing or chattering, and one of them said, “Are you texting your boo?”

Natasha raised an eyebrow at her. “You think I have a boo?”

One of the younger girls, a very earnest little white girl with a ponytail, sighed dramatically and said “Your butt is giant, of course you have a boo.”

“Hey now,” Dorothea said, alarmed. Natasha stared at her, blank with shock.

“My butt is giant,” she echoed faintly. Well.

“For a white lady,” one of the older black girls added kindly.

Natasha’s phone buzzed in her hand and she blinked at it.

Bucky: I may or may not be your boo but I will defend your butt

Bucky: which is perfect but does not mean you are a sex object

Bucky: that girl is a little shit

Bucky: I’ll fight her

Natasha laughed. “James, get out of the elevator shaft.”

Dorothea looked up. “What,” she said, just as the vent cover was removed from above. Bucky stuck his face down into the elevator.

“You don’t say things like that about people’s bodies,” he said. “You don’t assume things because of what people look like. It’s not right.”

This caused general pandemonium, and Natasha clung to the wall and fought off panic-- screaming, enclosed space, girls’ voices high and shrill, it yanked her back to remembering the fire. Bucky, on the other hand, looked utterly unfazed, and climbed down to drop neatly to the floor. He was wearing jeans and a Captain America hoodie, and had his sleeves shoved up to his elbows so the metal arm was obvious.

“Girls,” Dorothea said, “girls, settle down, settle-- Bucky, what are you doing?”

“I was texting Natasha,” he said, “but, hey! Hey!” He raised his voice, pitched just right to cut through the pandemonium rather than adding to it. “Ladies! Ladies. Listen up! I need everybody to shut their mouths! Right now!”

Incredibly, it worked; all the girls clustered against the walls of the elevator and turned to look at him, wide-eyed, though they weren’t exactly silent-- more a low hum than the unearthly piercing shrieking.

“Are you Girl Scouts?” Bucky asked.

“Yes!” a few voices said, and the low hum went up to a dull roar and then subsided.

“You gotta be the same kind of Girl Scouts as they were when I was a kid,” he said.

“Girl Scouts of America was founded in 1912 by Juliette Gordon Low in Savannah, Georgia,” one of the girls rattled off.

“Bingo,” Bucky said. “Do you know who I am?”

The dull roar exploded again, with the general trend being “Bucky Barnes!”, and eventually it died down again.

“I sure am,” he said. “Did you know I was born in 1917?” There was a more subdued chorus that was generally affirmative. “I had three little sisters,” he went on. “And I never joined the Boy Scouts, but they all joined the Girl Scouts. Do any of you have big brothers?”

There was an uproar at that, all different answers, but a few of the girls did. “What are big brothers good for?” he asked.

Several of the girls shouted answers ranging from “horsey rides!” to “nothing!” to “yelling at!” and Bucky catalogued them easily. Natasha couldn’t believe he could keep his head in all this noise.

“All kinds of things,” Bucky said. “That’s the answer.”

  
  


Pepper stood by the doorway of the boardroom, looking bemused. “What happened?” she asked.

“Bucky caught wind of the Girl Scout visit to the Tower,” Natasha said, “and took over as tour guide.”

“Should I ask why?” Pepper asked.

Natasha shrugged. “Apparently his little sisters were all Girl Scouts,” she said. She fidgeted. “And I… I’m not one hundred percent on this but I think that for a while the Soviets had him training teenage girls in the Red Room’s Black Widow program. He’s… really good at teenage girls.”

“Really,” Pepper said.

“Yes,” Natasha said. “And not in a creepy way.”

 

 


	2. Retro Kitsch

“I do not even know how I got roped into this,” Kate said. “Like-- do I look like I was ever a Girl Scout?”

“Shut your pie-hole, Katie-Kate,” Bucky said. He was uncharacteristically cheerful.

“Is this even legal?” Kate asked, scrambling after Natasha. “I mean-- aren’t we-- there’s got to be a law against this.”

Natasha shrugged, and slammed the van’s liftgate. “The parents all signed the permission slips,” she said.

“And you’re really-- you’re really doing this,” Kate said.

“Why did you come along?” Natasha asked. “Nobody forced you to volunteer for this."

“I figured it was code!” Kate said. “I figured-- no way are the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier genuinely taking a bunch of 14-year-old girls camping, this has gotta be a secret mission!”

Bucky stepped out from behind the car. “You wanted to come on a mission with the two of us so bad,” he said.

“Well,” Kate said. “The Black Widow! And the Winter Soldier! That’s some hardcore Cold War shit, it’s like, retro kitsch. Also I’m fucking terrified of both of you and I want to know your secrets.”

“Flattering,” Bucky said.

Natasha tilted her head to one side, as if conceding the point, but said, “I refuse to consider myself retro kitsch.”

“I totally am though,” Bucky said. “That’s cool.”

* * * 

 

“So,” Mercedes said, leaning against the van door and twirling the keys, “we gonna take turns driving? There’s two vans and five adults, so that’s--”

“Six,” her son Jose said. He was 16 and had his learner’s permit and was only lowering himself to hang out with the little girls with the promise of really badass survival skills. And his mother’s refusal to let him stay in the house alone all week.

“Sure,” Kate said brightly, grabbing for the keys. Bucky snatched them right out of her hand before she even noticed him moving.

“Ah,” Bucky said, “I dunno.”

“I’m a great driver,” Kate said, genuinely astonished. “I’m the best driver in the Avengers!”

“Like ninety percent of your driving experience is combat-related,” Bucky said.

“So?” Kate looked at Mercedes. “I’m an amazing driver.”

“You mostly hit other cars with your car,” Bucky said, “and while it’s impressive and has saved many lives, these are also rental vans. Full of children.”

“I can drive steady enough for Hawkeye to do all kinds of trick shots out the window,” Kate said. “Including this one time when he was naked-- ugh, I know, right? he keeps doing that-- and he hit the pursuit with an acid arrow right in the engine block! It was a good shot but it was only possible because I’m a great driver!”

“And you promptly busted through a barricade of other cars with the hood of your car, even though it was a Volkswagen Beetle,” Natasha said.

“It takes a lot of skill to break a barricade with a Volkswagen Beetle,” Kate said, hands on hips. “And it was one of the new Beetles, too, so it was like 90% plastic and built like a Barbie car. But I drove out of that one!”

“I read that mission report. The other cars were Minis,” Bucky said. “It had to have been the rinky-dinkiest car chase in the history of car chases.”

“Yeah but they had guns,” Kate argued.

“I see,” Mercedes said faintly. She turned to Natasha.

“I’m a perfectly responsible driver,” Natasha said.

“You drive it like you stole it and not in the smart way,” Bucky said.

Natasha tipped her head, conceding the point. “But I don’t get tickets,” she said.

“You lured the cops into a high-speed chase for no reason,” Bucky said, “and eluded them.”

“Fine,” Natasha said, “you drive.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license,” Bucky said patiently.

“I let you drive my car all the time!” Natasha said, indignantly smacking his arm. It was the metal arm, and she knew that and pretended to have hurt her fingers, for the benefit of the two watching young women.

“I’m legally dead!” Bucky said. “I don’t have a passport, I don’t have a driver’s license, I don’t have a--”

“You have all those things,” Kate interrupted. “I’ve seen them.”

“But they’re fakes,” Bucky said. “All my government documents are fakes.”

“They had your name on them,” Kate said.

“My name is not James Buckanan Branes,” Bucky said.

“Oh,” Kate said. “Uh, I’m not a great speller.”

“So!” Mercedes said brightly, taking the keys out of Bucky’s hand, “Amanda, you and I will be driving the entire way. I hope you like Red Bull.”

Jose was too busy staring adoringly at Bucky to protest that he should get a turn.

 

***

 

The vans had stereos, which was a Situation. The co-leader Amanda insisted that driver picks music in her van, and so they listened to her indie folk without protest. But Van A was subjected to a rotating DJ selection, on the basis that shotgun picks music, and they arm-wrestled to determine who was shotgun. Natasha beat everyone except Bucky fair and square, and then beat him too by the expedient of wrapping her thighs around his neck and turning it into real wrestling. He allowed it on grounds of having to agree to it before she’d let him go, and not even he could enjoy being between her thighs when his airways were cut off for a prolonged period. (Up until he turned blue he seemed pretty into it, but keeping it PG was tricky.)

Out of misguided chivalry, he then let Kate take second place. Oxygen deprivation will do that to a man.

At first Natasha subjected them to an extended death metal set, probably out of pure contrariness. Bucky gave them all a surprisingly lengthy and well-researched oral presentation on the differences between black metal, death metal, and just plain metal. Kate played inoffensive classic rock except that somehow Bucky objected semi-violently to Springsteen. He was overruled, but mostly because Natasha thought it was funny to overrule him. This time, at least, it did not involve her thighs or the threat of strangulation, but rather a democratic process.

Then it was Bucky’s turn, and he proved to have a musical taste that pretty much lined up exactly with those of 13-year-old girls, so he was the most popular DJ and nearly caused a rebellion by calling for a democratic election to determine future DJ sets. Natasha accused him of pandering, but that actually seemed to please him. They stopped at a rest stop and regrouped rather than letting Kate try to wrestle Bucky out the car window, which was just as well; she’d known she wouldn’t win, but she’d been counting on his sense of chivalry to keep him from winning either. And that wasn’t actually all that good a bet, now that he’d recovered from the oxygen deprivation.


	3. Butterflies Are All Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is where I got the title.

“No,” Bucky said. “No, Natasha.”

Kate perked up. “What?” The Retro Kitsch Duo were sitting in the third bench seat with one of the girls. Kate was in the middle seat with two girls, and Mercedes was driving with Jose on shotgun. Jose, fortunately, had opted to turn the radio off, and most of the girls were passed out.

“No,” Bucky said. “You’re not designing any of this course.”

“I know a great deal more about what a little girl is capable of enduring than you do,” Natasha pointed out.

“I beg to differ,” Bucky said, “and also, your training program had an eighty percent fatality rate.”

“Washout rate,” Natasha said. “That’s different. The fatalities were under fifty percent.”

“We can’t let any of them die,” Bucky said.

“I wasn’t going to,” Natasha said.

“I don’t want any of them to wash out either,” Bucky said. “That’s not the point.”

“You can’t expect results without consequences for failure,” Natasha said.

“The results I expect are little girls learning about nature and survival,” Bucky said. “I’m not trying to form my own extragovernmental team of girl assassins.”

“Ay Dios Mio,” Mercedes said faintly.

“No, no, this is good,” Kate said. “This is a good discussion. I’m glad they’re having it now, not after the casualties start mounting.”

“It’s not even winter,” Natasha said, exasperated. “No one is going to die of exposure even if we do--”

“We’re doing this my way,” Bucky said, “not yours, I don’t care.”

Natasha answered in Russian, and Bucky followed her into Russian without really noticing; Kate had noticed that, that Bucky generally answered in the same language and tone he was addressed in, without any conscious choice in the matter. Natasha, however, knew what she was doing, and she was clearly haggling with him over, Kate supposed, what level of casualties was allowable, and had deliberately chosen to do so in a language nobody else would be able to follow.

“Don’t worry,” Rachel said, next to her-- Rachel was twelve, and her father’s grandfather was Bucky’s cousin, and was how they’d wound up with this particular troop in the first place. “My Uncle Bucky’s a Howling Commando, there’s no way this could go wrong.”

“Because the Howling Commandos were known for their excellent planning,” Kate said.

“Ay,” Mercedes said again, “Dios mio, Jesus salvanos.”

 

***

 

They finally broke and let Kate drive one of the vans, and Jose the other, and with Kate in the lead they made really good time once Mercedes fell asleep and stopped watching the speedometer and reaching over to flash the headlights every time Kate went more than ten over the limit.

They stopped at dawn to consult the map and switch drivers again, and Mercedes realized how far they’d come and stared at Kate narrow-eyed for a long moment as she did the math.

“We were fine,” Kate pointed out.

“No point worrying about the past,” Rachel said cheerfully. She was an unceasingly chipper child.

“We went so fast,” Jose said. He was sort of floating as he stood, dreamy-eyed.

“I should have packed more Tums,” Mercedes said.

“Too late now,” Bucky said, in a tone of voice disconcertingly similar to Rachel’s.

 

***

 

So it was a standard hiking route they were following, going in for two days, camping at a lodge for two days, and coming back out for two days, with a day or so of wiggle room for slow progress or exercises. They were traveling light with minimal gear, but the lodge would be relatively cushy, they were assured.

It was a former SHIELD training area, but they’d been guaranteed there wasn’t anything left behind from prior training runs. The trail wasn’t groomed or artificially built-up very much, but it was passable on foot with no special equipment or mountaineering skills required, and it was pretty clear of undergrowth. Natasha had swept it herself, with Sam’s help, and concurred.

Natasha oversaw the unloading, and checked everyone’s backpacks to ensure proper load distribution. Kate checked in with the Tower, as they’d been asked to, and got a confirmation that they were greenlit to use the space.

Kate turned on her camera and came around the side of the van to focus on Bucky, who was grimly doing a headcount.

“Aren’t you gonna give us a pep talk?” Kate asked, fidgeting with the camera settings.

“What?” He glanced over at her, and she shrieked with laughter: his hair had been French-braided and was studded here and there with tiny rhinestone-encrusted barrettes, and his eyes were outlined with a generous layer of inexpertly-applied bright gold glitter. “What?” he repeated, even more grim.

“Your hair,” she said, “oh my-- your face-- did you know they did that?”

“Of course I did,” he said, affronted. “I picked out the barrettes myself.” He tilted his head down toward her. “Look, they’re stars.”

“Some of them are butterflies,” Kate observed, getting a close-up shot.

Bucky shrugged. “There was only a six-pack of the stars ones,” he said. “They had to improvise. Butterflies are all right.”

“You look,” Kate said, shaky with mirth, “you look-- with the glitter--”

“I look fabulous,” Bucky growled. “It’s Sunburst, from the Ke$ha pallette at Sephora, it is very in this season.”

“He’s the Glitter Soldier,” Megan declared solemnly. She was Rachel’s bestie, thirteen and sweetly, irresistibly ruthless. A small herd of younger brothers had given her phenomenal reflexes and a terrifying ability to monitor all activities going on outside her field of view, especially behind her.

“Is he now,” Kate said, trying her damnedest to keep a straight face.

“Damn straight,” Bucky rumbled, in the single most menacing growl she’d ever heard him make-- and she’d heard some shit, from him. This was awesome.

 

***

 

With a minimum of fanfare, they set off down the trailhead. Natasha took point and Kate took six, each of them accompanied by a very interested and excited girl. Bucky hung back just out of machine-gun-burst pattern from Natasha, with Mercedes.

Kate was videoing. Natasha was in on it. Bucky had a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t going to use the footage for what they said they were, but his suspicion was that Natasha was going to put together a training video for the Army as a kind of fuck-you since they’d asked Bucky to come give a seminar like this to their Special Forces guys but had simultaneously told him he wasn’t entitled to any back pay since he’d been declared dead. And Bucky was 100% on-board with the Army getting a cheerful training video featuring him wearing rhinestone barrettes and imparting his precious wisdom to a bunch of adolescent girls.

So he was wearing a microphone.

“Kinda wanna get a start on it,” Bucky said. “Figure we’ll break around 0900 and have a snack, and a pep talk then.”

“Fair,” Mercedes said. She kept looking over at him and having to look away, trying rather poorly to conceal her mirth.

“Look,” Bucky said eventually, knowing that the girls were picking up on it and waiting for him to react, “a part of survival skills is camoflage, right? I figure, I’m badly outnumbered by adolescent girls, a good coating of glitter never hurt anyone’s machismo.”

Kate gave him a thumbs-up and he winked at her.


	4. The Number One Most Important Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I admit I actually pretty much cribbed this whole thing from the SAS Survival Manual. I bought it fair and square on Amazon.   
> The bit about the tampons wasn't in there, though. And there's no glitter, so my version's better.

  
  


“Ok,” Bucky said, “so.” A ring of expectant young faces stared up at him. Natasha didn’t let herself fidget, watching; it was pinging at a long-buried memory, and it was all she could do to stay where she was, at the edge of the circle, keeping watch, instead of sitting with the little girls and staring up attentively at the instructor.

“So I know you guys prepared for this trip for a while,” he said. “You’ve got your little survival kits, and you’ve been doing day hikes, and you’ve all done a ton of homework. So I don’t really have to go over the basics or anything. But I just wanna review, okay?”

The girls did have survival kits, Natasha noticed-- most of them were carrying little tins or boxes and had spent a great deal of time playing with them in the car, and some of them had glued rhinestones on them or painted things on them in glitter or put stickers on them. There was a lot of glitter, in this crowd.

(She wasn’t jealous of Bucky’s gaudy eye makeup, but she had stolen two of his butterfly barrettes and one of the stars so far. She’d have them all by lunchtime.)

“What is the number one most important thing to have with you in a survival situation?” Bucky asked.

Hands shot up, and their owners didn’t wait to be called on. “A knife!”

“A compass!”

“Matches!”

“A map!”

“Tampons!”

Bucky had been nodding along, but he paused then, along with everyone else, and they all looked at the last girl, who flushed dark but set her jaw and said, “They’re important.”

“You’re not wrong,” Bucky said. “All of those things are good to have.”

“Tampons?” one of the girls said skeptically. “Not if you’re a boy.”

“They make good wound dressings,” Bucky said. “Or firestarters.”

“Do you even know what one is?” the same girl said.

Bucky laughed. “You think I don’t? C’mon, maybe I don’t use ‘em but I know a lot of people who do. They even had those before the war.”

“Oh!” another girl said, “a GPS!”

Bucky laughed. “Also not bad to have but c’mon, they hadn’t even invented those yet when the Howling Commandos were runnin’ all their missions.”

“Oh,” the girl said, embarrassed.

“Don’t feel bad, nobody’s got it yet,” Bucky said. “C’mon. We’re talking about something really fundamental. Something absolutely crucial that you need to have to get through anything.”

“Water,” another girl said.

“You do need that to live,” Bucky said, “but you can go two days without and you can’t possibly carry all that you’ll need.” He looked around. “C’mon, there’s one thing that you really need in order to get through anything. One thing I had with me every single mission I ran, every single time I got myself into trouble I wasn’t sure how I was gonna get out of.”

“Tweezers?” someone suggested.

“Band-Aids,” someone else guessed.

“Water purification tablets,” another ventured.

“Jesus,” said Mercedes’s daughter Laura, wide-eyed.

Bucky brought his hand up sharply and pointed at her. “Too specific,” he said.

She stared back, excited but baffled. “... Faith?” she said finally.

“Faith in yourself,” Bucky said, and God, he was intense, charismatic in a way that not even Steve was. “Will to live. Lots of things you can call it. Determination. True grit. Whatever. In my case, it was mostly a sheer cussed stubbornness. There was no way I was gonna let those assholes win. I was gonna survive and I was gonna go back to them and I was gonna shove it right down their throats.” He laughed, and shrugged. “Whatever gets you through. You gotta want it, you gotta believe you can make it out.”

“Ohhhh,” several of the girls said.

“More than anything else,” Bucky said, “that’s why you prepare, that’s why you think ahead, that’s why you practice, that’s why you study. The more stuff you have up here,” and he tapped his temple, “the more tools you have in your brain to use, the less it matters what you have in your hands, and the more likely you are to be able to get out of whatever you find yourself in the middle of.”


	5. Crisis Averted

 

  
“Man the thing about survivalists,” Bucky said, standing with his hands on his hips and looking up through the tree branches, “they all got, like, mystical bonds with the Earth, and shit. Like, divining true north from the whisper of the trees or whatever.” As they got further from civilization his speech was notably coarsening. Kate was filming him in profile; Natasha was standing out of the direct line of complaints as the troop leaders were making sure all the girls got water.

“Me, though,” Bucky went on in a moment, “I’m a city kid. I seriously never saw a lawn that wasn’t mowed until I was in Basic. I’m from Brooklyn, right? Like I know shit about, like, stars or whatever.”

“You were born in Indiana,” Natasha felt obligated to comment.

Bucky looked blank for a moment, then turned slightly. “Damn it, woman,” he said. “Yeah, you got me. Okay. But being a kid in the Midwest didn’t really prepare me for, you know, the shit forests of Europe.”

“If you say that particular vulgarity one more time,” Natasha said in tart Russian, “I will make you eat it.”

“Do you promise?” Bucky asked, remembering to speak English, and tilted his head with a strange predatory sparkle in his eye. Oh, he was enjoying himself all right. This had been an excellent idea.

“I know how to make it so you won’t enjoy it,” Natasha said, sticking to English. “Enough badmouthing Europe. Our forests are no worse than yours, and I have been to Indiana, it is not that nice a place.”

“No,” Bucky said. “No, it isn’t.”

“It’s not so bad,” Mercedes said, tuning in to the conversation a little late. “I was there a while. Not a lot by way of… landscape features.”

“That’s my point,” Bucky said. “Like, all this navigation stuff-- I knew that if you got in a real big cornfield just follow the rows until you find the edge and then you’ll find your way home. That’s the kinda terrain I knew about. So I get in the Army and they mostly gave me training about how to shoot really small things from real far away.”

“So why are you out here teaching us?” Megan asked. Zero time for shit, that girl had; Natasha had decided to take her under her wing, because she was terrifying, just like Natasha liked them.

“I get by,” Bucky said. “So here’s lesson number, I dunno, two or whatever we’re on. If you’re by yourself, do what you gotta, but if you’re in a group, everybody gets a job or a specialty or something. If you got a map, you all should look at it in case you get separated, but hanging onto it is one person’s job, and keeping track of where you are.”

“That’s me,” Mercedes said, and produced her map, which was a heavily-amended, probably-accurate version of the wildly incorrect commercially available map of this area that SHIELD had approved. “I’m the navigator.”

“In the Howling Commandos,” Rachel said, “who was the navigator?”

“Not me,” Bucky said. “Nominally Steve. Mostly Jones, though. He was the radio operator and had to know where we were to report, so he kept track. Steve told us where we were supposed to be going. Jones told us where we actually were.”

“What did you actually do, then?” Tamika asked. She was a sturdy, good-natured girl and Natasha hadn’t decided about her yet. Sometimes those were the most viciously goal-oriented in a pinch, but sometimes they just fell all to pieces, and you couldn’t tell until the chips were down, really.

“He shot people,” Rachel said smugly.

“No, I shot people for HYDRA,” Bucky said, not smiling. “For the Commandos I did a bit of shooting but mostly I was busy being the NCOIC.”

“How many people have you killed?” Megan asked, fascinated.

“You know,” Bucky said, eyebrows drawing together, “we’ll talk about that around the campfire tonight. You wanna know something awesome?”

“What?” Megan asked.

“You don’t have to be scared of ghost stories when you’re camping with the Black Widow,” he said, and his grin was, even for him, unsettling.

  
  


***

 

Bucky had wisely put Natasha in charge of woodcraft. She was more renowned for her skill at urban evasion tactics, naturally, but she knew more woodcraft than him and Kate put together, “because the Russians are savages,” he’d explained gleefully, and then the children had gotten a free bonus demonstration of how a fast, nimble smaller person could use her body weight, inertia, and leverage to take a much larger opponent directly to the ground.

He was having a phenomenal time on this trip. It had been a great idea. He couldn’t understand why Steve had looked so horrified when he’d told him about it. Just as well Grumpy Gus had been busy and hadn’t come along. Steve was such a humorless city slicker.

Part of woodcraft involved a lot of bending to look at tree bark and things, and Natasha was wearing a really great pair of nearly worn-out jeans that fit her like the paper on the wall. Bucky was a great admirer of Natasha’s various assets and his not exactly purely-aesthetic appreciation of her particular scenery was absolutely adding to his overall appreciation of the day. He wasn’t being all creepy or anything, he wasn’t even paying particular attention, it was just part of the overall experience and contributing positively to his mood.

Unfortunately, Jose had noticed that too. And he wasn’t nearly as practiced or subtle as Bucky was at admiring that kind of view.

In order to save him from another demonstration, this time of how a fast, nimble small person could take down a less-fast, less-aware, not-very-large person without even looking, Bucky pulled him aside.

“Life lesson time, kid,” he said, startling Jose badly with a heavy hand to his shoulder and pulling him back with a carefully-calculated but forceful yank. The others were all raptly watching Natasha’s demonstration of how to tell the age of a track in the mud, so no one seemed to notice; Mercedes glanced absently over and seemed to dismiss it as the boys clowning around.

“Uh,” Jose stammered, catching his balance with some awkward flailing. “Uh, what?”

“Listen,” Bucky said, “so here’s the thing. I was your age once, I know what this is like. You gotta learn discipline in all things, and it’ll come with age and practice, but number one is you gotta remember, your number one ambition is to survive to adulthood.”

“I, uh,” Jose said, but he wasn’t a stupid kid and caught on almost immediately, and blushed. “I don’t mean-- I wasn’t-- I know she’s your woman--”

Bucky clapped his hand over Jose’s mouth, giving an exaggeratedly wide-eyed and fearful glance over toward Natasha. “Oh my God,” he hissed, pretending dead-seriousness, “don’t let her hear you talk like that. She doesn’t belong to anybody but herself.”

“Oh,” Jose said when Bucky took his hand away. “But I thought--”

“This ain’t about territory,” Bucky said. “Sometimes girls like that, if you peacock around and fight off other suitors and whatever. But we’re not animals. If I acted like I had any claim on her she’d never speak to me again. She belongs to herself and it’s a privilege to even get to speak to her. You gotta remember that; it’s a privilege to even get to look at her.”

Jose stared at him for a moment, glanced over, looked guilty, and nodded.

“I love those jeans,” Bucky went on, “those are my favorite pair of jeans she owns, but she wore those because they’re comfortable and will stand up to prickerbushes, not for us to admire the view. Don’t mean we can’t admire it, y’know, but you gotta be respectful about it.”

“Yes, sir,” Jose said earnestly, “absolutely sir.”

  
  
  


***

Building shelters was a hilarious diversion. They had a few tarps and things, and Natasha knew Bucky had at least one tent stashed among his pack in case it rained, but for the diversion they were building bivouacs. Most of the girls were strong and enthusiastic, though some of them did more than their fair share of whining.

“You are not Howling Commandos,” Natasha said, patience frayed by Rachel’s inability to focus on digging a hole instead of talking about how famous her uncle was. “This is not the Howling Commandos. The noise you all make, it is more like whining than howling.”

This occasioned much mirth, and Natasha was not so humorless as to deny that having her joke laughed at improved her temper a great deal. (Bucky had caught on that she was putting on the Russian accent for effect, finally; she’d been worried when he’d apparently failed to notice earlier, but he’d probably just been playing it straight.)

“The Glitter Soldier,” Megan declared with some satisfaction, “and the Whining Commandos.”


	6. Wifey Material

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: mention of infertility, implied sex, ungrammatical Russian, paranoia

 

There was a sharp tug, and Natasha put her hand up and turned to find that Bucky had just yanked a barrette out. “Hey,” she said.

“If you want my butterflies,” he said, “you have to ask,” and he slid the hairpin back into his own hair. She still had two of them, but his braid was badly frayed.

“I picked up one of them off the ground,” she said, frowning. “Your braid is falling out.”

He patted at it. “Well shoot,” he said.

Amanda was teaching the girls about cooking over a fire, which was exceedingly diverting. They’d discovered in the planning stages that Bucky’s idea of eating on missions was pretty nonexistent, his stories from WWII were frankly disgusting, and Natasha’s experiences were objectively horrifying from any viewpoint. Kate wasn’t much of a cook in any situation. But Amanda had all kinds of backpacking experience and lots of badges in this sort of thing from her own days as a Girl Scout, so they left her in charge of it.

The girls were making some sort of roasted-in-ashes thing, and they were assured there’d be enough for them so they should probably stay away.

“It’s going pretty well,” Natasha commented. Bucky got his metal hand tangled in his hair and was trying not to let on. She let him continue for a moment before sighing and sitting back on the log she was using for a seat, gesturing between her knees. “C’mon, siddown, I’ll fix your hair so it’s pretty again.”

Bucky gave her a look, considering it, and slunk down to sit in front of her. She removed the hair ties and combed his hair out with her fingers, sticking the hair thingies into her own hair so they wouldn’t get lost. His fingers came easily untangled as soon as the ties were loose.

He relaxed, slinging his arms over her legs and nestling in. She squeezed her knees against his ribs, enjoying the living motion of his body as he breathed.

“You are enjoying yourself,” she tried again.

“Yeah,” he said. “I really am.”

“I do not think most of these girls would have made it out of the Red Room,” she said.

“Megan would,” he said. “Soledad, she’s quiet but she’s sharp. Some of the others might surprise you. The littler Park sister, she’s got promise.”

“They’re all too old to start,” Natasha said.

Bucky shrugged. “I was older,” he said.

“You were not a Black Widow,” she answered, drawing herself up a little huffily.

He laughed. “No,” he said, “no, I was not.”

Natasha heard Kate creeping quietly toward them, and said, “So, which one are we going to implant the trigger words in?”

“Oh,” Bucky said, sounding interested, “you know, we might need to test them a little more before we decide. Maybe we should make them fight each other.”

“Good idea,” Natasha said approvingly, then went on in Russian, “Do you think we can convince the young eye of the hawk that we’re really doing something nefarious, without alarming the troop leaders?”

“Perhaps,” Bucky answered in the same language. “Is she in earshot now?”

“Yes,” Natasha said.

He shrugged one shoulder. “I think just talking intently in Russian a lot should do it.”

“Probably,” Natasha said. She turned her head slightly, then made a show of noticing Kate. “Oh,” she said, “hi, there you are! Come sit.”

“How long--” Bucky said, convincingly alarmed, then gave her a patently false grin. “Hi, Kate.”

“Hi,” Kate said carefully, dropping down onto the log next to Natasha. “What are you doing?”

“Fixing Buckushenka’s hair,” Natasha said, too-sweet.

Bucky made a gagging noise, probably at the nickname. Stood to reason, it wasn’t even grammatical. Having learned Russian the hard way, he took exception to it being spoken poorly. He’d been the brunt of enough fake-Russian jokes, she supposed.

“Looks nice,” Kate said.

“If he would hold still,” Natasha said emphatically.

“So um,” Kate said.

There was a moment. “What?” Natasha asked, beginning to stick the barrettes back into Bucky’s hair.

“Uh,” Kate said.

“What?” Natasha stopped and looked at her. So did Bucky. This was awesome. Kate was really really uncomfortable.

“Uh, do you think dinner will be any good?” Kate asked, forcing a light grin. Really, a socialite’s daughter should be able to do better.

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” Natasha said. “That Amanda-- she’s definitely wifey material.”

“I think she’s got a girlfriend,” Bucky said. “She didn’t say but I got the vibe.”

“Wifey,” Kate said blankly. “Material.”

“Yeah,” Natasha said. “You know, wifey material.”

“Like,” Bucky said, “she cooks, she cleans, she knows how to fix stuff, she’s organized, she can put in stitches, bandage you up, feed you good, keeps her head, got bangin’ tits and birthin’ hips. The whole nine yards.”

“You’ve evaluated her birthing hips,” Kate said.

“Actually, I haven’t,” Bucky said, and leaned forward, craning his neck to peer at Amanda.

“You were too busy looking at mine,” Natasha said.

“I love these jeans,” Bucky said, subsiding and wrapping his fingers around her lower leg. “I love your ass in these jeans.”

“Is Natasha wifey material?” Kate asked. Natasha gave her a glare. Bucky looked up.

“No,” he said, but he said it slowly. “No, Natasha’s… something else.”

“Are these not birthing hips?” Kate asked, poking Natasha’s hip.

It shouldn’t have affected Natasha at all, but she let go of Bucky’s hair, stood up, stepped over him, and walked away rather than acknowledge the strange knife-like twist in her gut. Her hips did not matter. Hips were immaterial when one did not have a functioning womb.

And anyway she would never have made any kind of wife for anyone. She only had any domestic training as it pertained to blending in for missions.

Behind her, she heard Bucky say to Kate, “I wouldn’t go there, if I were you.”

 

***

 

Bucky came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, putting his chin on her shoulder. “I notice,” he said, low and rumbling in her ear, in that precise tone that made her spine tingle a little bit, “that you managed to get away with every single one of my barrettes.”

“I did,” she said, smug. She still had all of them in her hair.

“Kate gets the assist, though,” he said.

“Sure,” she said, “I suppose. Are you keeping watch tonight or am I?”

He nuzzled into the hollow of her neck, his breath warm. “I’ll take first shift,” he said. “You come relieve me around 3?”

“I could come a little early and distract you,” she said.

“On a mission,” he said. “Never!”

She laughed. “This isn’t a mission,” she said.

“Then why are we keeping watch?” he asked.

“Because of who we are,” she answered. She turned around in his arms, stretching up to wrap her arms around his neck. “And where we are. I know this place is safe now, but it’s known to HYDRA because of who it used to belong to. Do you want to be found asleep?”

“No,” he said.

“Then keep watch,” she said, “and I will spell you, and probably make it worth your while.”

  
  


***

“Oh God,” Kate said as the realization hit her. Everyone looked a little rough this morning, sleep-rumpled and a little grumpy and poorly-rested, dirty messy hair and grime on their faces and tired expressions. Except for Bucky. He looked bright-eyed, cheerful, comfortable and relaxed, and there was something about his glossy, smug look that radiated sexual satisfaction.

“What,” Bucky said, looking up from his smug contemplation of the percolator.

“You got laid,” Kate hissed angrily. “Seriously?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, far too pleasantly. “I just got a really good night’s sleep.” He stretched, obnoxiously cracking his spine.

“I know for a fact you were up keeping watch,” Kate said.

“I don’t need a lot of sleep,” Bucky commented mildly. “Anyway if I was keeping watch how could I be doing what you’re accusing me of?”

Kate narrowed her eyes. His hair was freshly braided, and done competently enough that it was clear the little girls hadn’t done it. He only had two star barrettes in it now, though, tastefully arranged just above his ear on one side. “I’m onto you,” she hissed.

“You’re the one that wanted to come on a mission with us retro relics,” Bucky said, shrugging. “If you’d asked Steve he woulda warned you.”

 

Correction, Kate thought a little later, as she sat with her coffee and attempted to get her brain to come fully online. Everyone but Bucky and Natasha looked rough. Natasha looked perfect and flawless like she always did. It hardly mattered, was hardly worth noting, but it was a data point. She also was wearing all of the rest of Bucky’s barrettes, studded across her head as if arranged in a headband. Or halo.

Right.

There was no way they were really conspiring to reprogram any of the little girls. Kate knew enough about both their histories that they surely wouldn’t condone that kind of abuse to any other children.

Would they?

She needed more information. She pulled out her phone and started to compose a text to Clint, when she had the sudden chilling memory of Clint giving her a note to bring Bucky because he was sure Natasha could read his texts.

Well, shit.

Was it worth the risk?

Maybe she needed to collect more data first. 


	7. A Varied Diet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning-ish on this chapter: it contains children discussing sexuality, including talking about texting nudes and ideas of homosexuality etc. Nobody’s sexually exploiting children, and the adults’ discomfort is discussed. I’m basing a lot of this on the kinds of conversations I had as a freshman in high school, which is the age these girls are supposed to be. They’re adolescents, not little children, and while I’m going for humor, there’s some realism here. I learned about this stuff at this age. And I repeat, nobody’s sexually exploiting children, and the children aren’t doing anything with each other; it’s just talk. Still, I figured I should warn, since this has been relatively innocent up to now.

  


  


Even out here there were phones. Most of the girls’ batteries had died, but Amanda had a carefully hoarded solar charger and was circumspect but not secretive about checking her phone for a little while every night.

Bucky, Kate, and Natasha all had some pretty bomb Starkphones and accompanying recharge packs, but Bucky was the only soft touch. He let some of the girls play with his phone from time to time, and text their moms and so on. Neither of the women let the girls ever touch their phones, but Bucky was unconcerned.

“Do you just not have anything private on your phone, or what?” Kate asked at the lunch break, glancing up in surprise as he nonchalantly tossed his phone over to Mercedes’s daughter Laura, who caught it deftly.

“I got that shit locked down,” Bucky said. “No worries.”

“Uh,” Kate said, glancing back at Laura, who was watching their exchange with a glimmer of interest, “you gotta be careful about teenage girls, y’know?”

Bucky grinned. “I deleted all the nude selfies,” he said. “And I saved all the incriminating photos anybody else sent me to my laptop and nuked the phone. There’s nothin’ on there except the passcodes to some pretty high-up databases, and those are so goddamn boring they’re not worth hacking.”

Kate considered that. “Do people send you a lot of incriminating photos?” she asked.

“I do all right,” Bucky said. “I take a lot of incriminating photos.”

“Do you send dick pics to people?” Laura asked.

“Laura!” Mercedes said, scandalized.

“Not that I’d know anything about that!” Laura amended hastily, rather obviously having not realized her mother was within earshot. “I just, sometimes, you know. My friends have boys send them things like that.”

“I have never in my life sent a dick pic to anybody who hadn’t already seen it in person,” Bucky said haughtily. “That just ain’t genteel.”

“Genteel,” Kate said. “That’s the number one thing I think of when I think of you.”

“Why thank you,” Bucky said, ignoring the sarcasm.

“You do send them, though,” Laura said slyly.

“Only when it’s funny,” Bucky said. “Actually I think I only send them to Steve.”

“Steve _Rogers_?” Laura’s voice squeaked slightly.

“It’s hilarious,” Bucky assured her. “He still blushes like a tomato, and he gets all indignant and sputters at me.”

“That I gotta see,” Kate marveled.

“Most of the time they’re not even pictures of _my_ dick,” Bucky said. “I just find ‘em on the Internet. I like to send ‘em when he’s on missions and stuff.”

“I’m uncomfortable with this conversation,” Amanda said, suddenly appearing to loom behind Bucky, “and they’re children.” It was the strongest opinion Kate had ever seen her have.

Bucky looked surprised. “I’m not endorsing this behavior,” he said. “I’m just saying, there’s nothing incriminating on that phone and there better not be when I get it back.”

“I don’t like it,” Amanda said.

Bucky stood up, but managed to do it in a way that didn’t crowd Amanda. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I’m not-- I wasn’t trying to imply anything.”

“They’re kids,” Amanda said, and she was still visibly upset.

“I know,” Bucky said. “I was one too, once. I did a lot of immature shit, some of which I still do. That’s all I meant by it.”

“Okay,” Amanda said, though she was if anything even more upset, and walked away back to where she’d been sitting to eat.

 

Kate managed to linger near enough to Amanda during the afternoon’s walking that she could overhear when Bucky caught up to her later. “I really didn’t mean anything,” he said quietly, truly baffled.

“It’s okay,” Amanda said, suddenly near tears, and waved him off. “It’s fine.”

“It’s clearly not,” Bucky said, “and I’m sorry for it, I like you and I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” she said.

“I’m just worried I’ll do it again worse, because I don’t know what part upset you,” he said.

Amanda composed herself, and glanced over at him. “It’s stupid and it’s my hang-up and it doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Sure it does,” he protested.

She shook her head, and they walked in silence for a little while. “It’s stupid,” she said again.

“It’s really not,” he said, encouragingly.

There was another little stretch of silence, and finally she said, “But it’s not fair at all, because you and Steve Rogers are people and have a right to do whatever you like in your personal lives.”

Bucky considered that. “Okay,” he said. “But I get your point. He especially is kind of a role model for people, and they wouldn’t like to think of him doing something bad.”

“Well,” Amanda said. “Right.” She had moved from being upset to embarrassed. “Like I said, it’s stupid.”

“I promise he really is as good as his image projects,” Bucky said. “He’s not as humorless, he’s a little shit, but he’s genuinely not a bully.”

“That’s the part of Captain America that I’ve always really identified with,” Amanda said, all on a rush. “The part about-- about standing up to bullies.”

“Is that it?” Bucky asked. “That I bully him? I do, a little, but it’s-- I know he likes it, we push each other around all the time but we’d never really hurt each other if we could help it.”

“It’s not that,” Amanda said, and stopped.

“Then what?” Bucky said finally, when she didn’t go on. “He sends ‘em back! He finds pictures and sends them to me in return, it’s not just me bullying him.”

“I don’t,” she said, and she was near tears again. “It’s okay. Never mind.”

“No,” Bucky said, “no, tell me, really.”

She wiped her eyes. It was really getting to her, and Kate felt a pang of sympathy. It was hard, sometimes, to meet your idols. “I mean, you’re from olden times,” Amanda said. “It’s, it’s silly, and people project stuff onto you all the time. You must get this a lot.”

“I really don’t,” Bucky said. “Maybe Steve does. I don’t. Nobody’s ever liked me enough in my entire life to be let down by me.” He sounded genuine.

Amanda collected herself. “It just got me real upset to think that-- that you and Steve would embarrass each other with gay porn, basically. Like, eew, gross queers.” She wiped her face, sniffling. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t-- I take that stuff really personally. It makes me feel so icky. It made me so upset to think of someone I admired like that being… icky.”

“Oh,” Bucky said, sounding horrified.

“It’s okay!” Amanda said, with a watery laugh. She waved her hands. “It’s my hang-up! It’s my problem!”

“No,” Bucky said, “it’s-- no, no, that would be really gross, Amanda. It’s not-- that’s not what it is.”

“I’m sure,” she said, “I know you wouldn’t-- you’re not like, mean like that, it’s-- but it’s just-- all the douchey bros I went to high school with were like that, and I just-- it just set me off.”

“It’s really not like that at all,” Bucky said, gentler.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” Amanda said, shaky. “It’s okay. I’m-- I’m over it, it’s all right, it’s not your fault.”

Bucky took a breath, and let it out halfway. “Steve blushes because it turns him on,” he said finally.

Amanda stopped dead in her tracks. “What,” she said.

“I shouldn’t-- it’s not my place to tell people about him,” Bucky said, “but off the record, he’s, y’know. Almost as queer as I am.”

_What._

“You’re with Natasha,” Amanda said, skeptical, and started walking again, which was good because Kate was sort of worried she’d lose the others up ahead if they didn’t catch up a little.

Bucky snorted. “Nobody’s _with_ Natasha,” he said. “Natasha is like a cat that sometimes lets you pet her and anyone would be honored by the privilege but it’s not something you can count on or make happen.”

Amanda glanced over at him. “You’re,” she said, “you’re not kidding me?”

“No,” he said. “I may be a brainwashed supervillain but I’m not a liar. Not about stuff like that.” He shook his head tightly. “Christ, Amanda, you don’t think I understand? I’m a hundred goddamn years old, when I was a kid it was the kind of thing you _only_ joked about.”

_What._

“I,” Amanda said.

“I been makin’ him blush by gettin’ him hot since probably 1932,” Bucky said. “But he was-- he was about the only one who understood, and I understood him.”

“Oh,” Amanda said.

“But we’re-- we’re not ashamed,” Bucky said. “Or-- I’m not, anyway. And he-- he’s dating a guy, more seriously-- I can’t be in a relationship with anybody, not seriously, sorry, that’s more information than you needed, but I can’t be everything somebody needs, not with how fucked-up I am. And that’s-- it’s, it’s like that, Amanda. It’s not-- it’s not icky.”

“It’s not,” she said faintly, and she was crying again. “It’s, really?”

“Yes,” Bucky said gently, and they stopped and he hugged her.

“Oh my God,” she sniffled into his shoulder. “Are you-- you and Steve--?”

“Kinda,” Bucky said. “Like, that’s just part of it. We make out sometimes, I find or take dirty pictures I know will get under his collar, he does the same for me. The sex stuff is less important but it is a part of how we are.”

“You’re not fucking with me,” Amanda said, marveling.

“No, I’m not,” Bucky said, rubbing his hand across her back.

They stood like that a moment and Kate wiped her eyes, more moved than she’d expected.

“Bishop,” Bucky said suddenly, icy, “I think you had better re-evaluate your life choices and go catch up to the group.”

“Yessir,” Kate said, not bothering to hide as she crashed off through the undergrowth. She’d thought she’d been doing so well, there was no way he’d seen her and she hadn’t made a sound, but who even could tell with metahumans.

  


It was probably sort of fitting, then, that it was that evening after they stopped that Amanda, off to one side on her phone as dinner cooked, suddenly shot to her feet and let out a whoop.

“What,” Mercedes asked, alarmed. Natasha mentally peeled herself off her state of high alert, willing her heart rate back down.

“The Supreme Court,” Amanda said, “ _Obergefell vs. Hodges_.”

“What’s that?” Soledad piped up, first to speak of all the startled girls.

“The Supreme Court has found that the US Constitution guarantees the right of same-sex couples to have their marriages legally recognized in all 50 states,” Amanda said. She was crying. She’d been crying a lot that day, and Bucky had been sort of cagey about it, but Natasha knew she’d get it out of him after sundown.

“Oh honey, that’s great,” Mercedes said, and hugged her.

“Why does that matter, though?” Rachel asked. “I mean, it’s already legal in New York.”

Natasha was the closest adult, so she answered, “Imagine you were married in New York and went on vacation together to Florida, to Disney or something, and your wife slipped and hit her head and was in a coma in the hospital and they said you couldn’t go in and see her as she was dying because you weren’t married to her in Florida.”

The girls were silent for a moment. “Oh,” Rachel said.

“Exactly,” Natasha said. “It’s important.”

“That wouldn’t happen, though,” the older Park sister said uncomfortably.

“It _did_ happen,” Natasha said, “exactly like that, to several people. It happened to thousands of people in the 80s during the AIDS crisis when same-sex marriages weren’t recognized anywhere. It’s why marriage equality has been such a huge goal of gay rights activists for so long. It’s not going to solve everything, but it’s a big step forward.”

Bucky was hugging Amanda now, Natasha noticed. That was good, she liked Amanda even if she was sort of emotional. It was okay for people to be emotional. It was even okay for Natasha to be emotional, but she was going to work on that another day. Maybe when she wasn’t surrounded by little girls who were constant grating reminders of how different her own training had been.

“You know a lot about it,” Soledad said. Quiet but sharp; she might’ve survived the Red Room. If she could muster up a good pain tolerance.

“I do,” Natasha said. “I live in this world.”

“It don’t affect you, though,” Soledad went on. Ruthlessly prying.

“No,” Natasha said, “I’m not the marrying kind. But even for those of us who don’t care about getting married, we still like the option.”

“You’re not gay though,” Soledad said, driving the prybar right in.

“I’ve never said either way,” Natasha countered.

“Bucky’s your boyfriend, though!” Rachel said, shocked.

“I never said that either,” Natasha said. Everyone stared at Bucky, who had let go of Amanda. He noticed the scrutiny, and said, “What?”

“She ain’t your girlfriend?” Soledad asked.

Bucky blinked. “Natasha?” he said. “She’s whatever she wants to be.” He frowned. “I missed what you were talking about. Why does this matter?”

“They want to know whether marriage equality affects me personally,” Natasha said.

Bucky laughed. “Well, you ain’t exactly the marryin’ kind,” he said affectionately, “so no.”

“But she’s not a lesbian,” Soledad insisted, “because she’s with you.”

Bucky shrugged. “I hope you already know that you can be with more than one person in your life,” he said, “and the current one doesn’t overwrite everyone else you’ve ever been with.”

“That’s,” Soledad said, hesitating and looking sidelong at Natasha.

“Does that mean she’s bisexual?” Rachel piped up, with the air of someone who’d done a lot of reading.

“My mom says bisexuals are just greedy,” Kaitlynn piped up.

“I don’t think that’s a real thing,” Soledad said doubtfully. “Like, how can you be a lesbian if you’re dating a boy?”

“Are you a vegetarian?” Bucky asked. Soledad looked at him like he was insane.

“No,” she said, “I ate bacon this morning with everybody else.”

“Except me,” Rachel chimed in smugly; she was Jewish, but really just didn’t like bacon.

“Is Rachel vegetarian?” Bucky asked.

“No,” Soledad said, “she said she wasn’t.”

“But neither of you are eating meat right this moment,” Bucky said, “and Rachel hasn’t even eaten any meat today, so maybe she’s just faking when she says she’s not vegetarian? Maybe she’s just saying it for attention.”

“Samantha was vegetarian for like two weeks,” Rachel said, referring to an absent troop-mate. “But it didn’t last.”

“You can try it out and give it up and then come back to it later,” Bucky said, “and it doesn’t change who you are. I went years at a time without eating meat but it was never on purpose, so I don’t figure I’m a vegetarian at all. But maybe someday I’ll decide to be vegetarian and I can look back on all those years and say maybe that’s where it came from. Maybe I won’t, and those years will only make me appreciate now that much more. It don’t matter, it all shapes who you are, and what’s important is how you think about it.”

“I don’t know what this conversation is even about,” Kaitlynn complained.

“He’s saying,” Soledad said, with some relish, “that he likes a varied diet.”

They all looked at Bucky, who raised his eyebrows, but then grinned wickedly. “As it happens,” he said, “I do.”

“He doesn’t mean,” Rachel said, and everyone turned to look at Soledad.

Megan chimed in suddenly, out of nowhere. “He sure does,” she said. “He’s not talking about vegetarianism. He’s saying he likes cock.”

This occasioned much chaos and screaming and the like, and Bucky was in some danger of dying laughing but it would serve him right, so Natasha went over and offered her congratulations to Amanda, who did indeed have a very serious girlfriend with rather conservative family in Ohio, and Mercedes begged Amanda not to move to Ohio and leave her with these lunatics.

  
  



End file.
